Stance and Hyper-articulation: Vowel space expansion in Michael Savage’s stance expression
Studying variation from the standpoint of stance taking allows the sociolinguist to account for strategies speakers use to orient to the content of their talk and the activities and identities they index through that talk (Du Bois 2007; Jaffe 2009). A relatively low number of studies has examined the effects of stance taking on hyper-articulation (Freeman 2010, 2014; Holmes-Elliott & Levon 2017). However, these studies regarded stance as a uniform phenomenon without distinguishing between the different evaluation polarities or its target. This paper proposes a multivariate statistical analysis of the impact on articulation of positive and negative evaluations and the variation within, according to the target of stance. Specifically, I analyze the effect of these variables on the expansion of vowel space that usually signals hyper-articulation (Tomita 2007; Whalen et al. 2004), in Michael Savage’s show The Savage Nation.
